Next-Gen AMD CPU Could Offer Serious Competition for Intel

AMD hasn’t let much slip about their future CPU plans, except that they won’t make the transition before it makes financial sense. Rumours still point towards a 2016 Q2 to Q3 timeline with the latest coming from SweOverclockers.

The new AMD Zen could be built on a 14nm process which is quite the jump from the current 32nm SOI used for the FX chips and 28nm bulk silicon used for the current APUs. The chips are expected to be built by GlobalFoundries who have a long history with AMD and will be based on FinFET technology.

The new platform is said to either support a duality of DDR3 and DDR4 (Like they did with DDR2 and DDR3 for a while) or just solely the new DDR4 standard. A choice that most likely will be made at a later time and depending on the market situation at that time.

A TDW rating up to 95W suggest that AMD still wants to compete in the performance sector, but it is unknown if they’ll include an iGPU. The last part of the rumour suggests that AMD might move towards a Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) like Intel is using, as opposed to Cluster Multithreading (CMT) that currently is deployed in the FX line of CPUs.